Despite graduating from high school with “honors” and being accepted into the University of Connecticut on a scholarship, 19-year-old government-school victim Aleysha Ortiz cannot read or write. At all. Literally. And she’s hardly alone. Now, with help from an attorney, Ortiz is suing the city and the school board. And the national media is paying attention.
Ortiz moved to Hartford, Connecticut, from Puerto Rico as a young child and entered the local government school in first grade. She spent a full 12 years there, costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. But instead of teaching her literacy or writing, government school staff bullied and harassed her, according to the lawsuit alleging “negligence” and “infliction of emotional distress” extending through many years.
“My time in Hartford Public Schools was a time that I don’t wish upon anyone,” Ortiz told News 8 WTNH, one of the first outlets to pick up the story. “Every first day of school, I would tell the teacher I cannot read and write so please be patient for me, so everyone knew. I would cry knowing the people who had big titles knew this was happening, and no one stepped up to do something about it.”
So Trump is right about getting rid of the Department of Education as we know it
Delusions of Adequacy 
I had a student from Japan, pure textbook English, not a hint of idiom, colloquialism, connotation, or slanguage, who was failing ENC1101.
He recognized the words in blocks of text and could read printed material aloud for you, but he never grasped the meaning of the sentences or the paragraphs until he heard someone say it to him with proper inflection, tone, and emphasis.
He fully understood captions, labels, titles, and the concepts of metaphor, allegory, analogy, and allegory. Just couldn’t read flowing text. He might know every word in a chapter of a book of fiction, but have no idea what it all meant until someone told it to him orally.
He told us that English is “very cluttered language . . . too many words to say simple things . . . too many different ways . . . too many adjectives.” He also said linking verbs are superfluous. His example was “‘It is cold outside today.’ Too many words. Easier to say ‘cold today,’ or ‘temperature low now.’ What good does word ‘is’ do? And why ‘it’?
Since his degree plan was in computer science, I gave him a C- in Comp I. He simply could not pass the exit exam. And since he was going back to Japan anyway, the Department waived his requirement to take Comp II, which he would’ve failed. No doubt he would’ve understood Hamlet and Oedipus in movie format, but he’d never have been able to explain it in an essay in English.
Same thing with a young lady from Colombia in a class of high-school equivalency I taught a coupla times (I’ll never do that again).
Came here as a bride, got her green card, and her husband died in a training accident. She wanted to get a license to work in a beauty shop (hair and nails) but needed the high-school diploma as a minimum, AA degree if possible.
Tried her best, but no way she could pass the exams. Good kid, so we gave her a C- and her GED so she could go to work and not live on the dole. I bet if we could find her today she’s reading and writing quite well. Had the right attitude and personal discipline, so I reckon she never gave up.
OTOH, I had IBs and APs who had nothing but contempt for practice, universally saying things such as “I don’t need to know that stuff. I’ll have secretaries and assistants to do reports and papers for me.”
They don’t like it when you remind them that not knowing the rules of grammar, diction, clarity of expression, mechanics, and all the rest might make them unable to tell when their secretary has made so many fundamental errors that the paper’s credibility is suspect.
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